Bessie Head’s “Looking For A Rain God” tells the story of a family desperately struggling against a seven year drought that leads to a tragic fate. Villagers suffer from the starvation of waiting for the rain to pour across the land as they depend on it to grow their crops. Fearing the starvation they are faced in the coming year, Mokogobja recalls a memory of a rain making ceremony involving a ritual sacrifice of young children to the rain
god.
In the book “Sacred Rice” author and anthropologist Joanna Davidson delves into the life of Jola farmers in west Africa and explores how rice plays an important role in their lives. She uses storytelling, often personal in nature to demonstrate how rice plays a vital part not only in the gastronomical aspect in the lives of people in north-western Guinea-Bissau but also in their social, cultural, economic, religious and political aspects.
The book “In Search of April Raintree” is a passionate adventure of two Metis sisters trying to find their true identity. April had difficulties throughout her life with her ethnicity, gender and her personal life. Wondering one day if she’ll ever find happiness being a Metis woman.
Monique and the Mango Rains describes a companionship that progresses between the writer, Kris Holloway, and a local health care worker or midwife in the Nampossela village, Mali, for the period of the writer’s Peace Corps assignment there, from 1989 to 1991.
...ere watching the actual God. In this work, the events and nouns in nature symbolize the presence of God; whether it is beautiful and giving such as the pear tree, or destructive and vengeful such as the hurricane. Many events of the book revolve around the weather and the climate, the seasons, and it shows that religion is open-minded, and that it can be interpreted in many different forms.
The theme to this story is that people will always be different and you cannot force your ideas into them. In this story the priest is ignorant to the fact that these Indians do not want to have a Catholic burial and that they only want to use the holy water to bring rain. All the priest is interested in is gaining parishioners, while the Indians just want to pay their respects to the old man by staying true to their heritage.
Tradition is huge in small towns and families and allows for unity through shared values, stories, and goals from one generation to the next. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” carries that theme of tradition. The story follows a small town that performs the tradition of holding an annual lottery in which the winner gets stoned to death. It (tradition) is valued amongst human societies around the world, but the refusal of the villagers in “The Lottery” to let go of a terrifying long-lasting tradition suggests the negative consequences of blindly following these traditions such as violence and hypocrisy.
Shirley Jackson's “The Lottery” is a short story about the annual gathering of the villagers to conduct an ancient ritual. The ritual ends in the stoning of one of the residents of this small village. This murder functions under the guise of a sacrament that, at one time, served the purpose of ensuring a bountiful harvest. This original meaning, however, is lost over the years and generations of villagers. The loss of meaning has changed the nature and overall purpose of the lottery. This ritual is no longer a humble sacrifice that serves the purpose of securing the harvest but instead is a ceremony of violence and murder only existing for the pleasure found in this violence.
Imagine being in pain and not knowing where your family could be. Imagine walking for miles just to fetch something people can walk eight stairs to grab it. A ton of people are able to drive a car around place to place; meanwhile, others have to walk and just focus on taking one step at a time. In the book, A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park, Salva a boy from Southern Sudan, Africa in 1985 is in the middle of a Civil War and is running away and travels on foot to Ethiopia to a Refugee Camp. Nya, a young girl from Southern Sudan in 2008 has to walk eight hours twice every day just to get a miniscule amount of water for her family. Both characters exhibit countless traits while the reader learns about their journeys: miserable, dependable, scared, fearless, tough, and strong; however, after a careful analysis, two traits really stand out: miserable for Salva and dependable for Nya.
Love has the power to do anything. Love can heal and love can hurt. Love is something that is indescribable and difficult to understand. Love is a feeling that cannot be accurately expressed by a word. In the poem “The Rain” by Robert Creeley, the experience of love is painted and explored through a metaphor. The speaker in the poem compares love to rain and he explains how he wants love to be like rain. Love is a beautiful concept and through the abstract comparison to rain a person is assisted in developing a concrete understanding of what love is. True beauty is illuminated by true love and vice versa. In other words, the beauty of love and all that it entails is something true.
Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" uses the third-person dramatic point of view to tell a story about an un-named village that celebrates a wicked, annual event. The narrator in the story gives many small details of the lottery taking place, but leaves the most crucial and chilling detail until the end: the winner of the lottery is stoned to death by the other villagers. The use of the third-person point of view, with just a few cases of third-person omniscient thrown in, is an effective way of telling this ironic tale, both because the narrator's reporter-like blandness parallels the villagers' apparent apathy to the lottery, and because it helps build to the surprise ending by giving away bits of information to the reader through the actions and discussions of the villagers without giving away the final twist.
A natural disaster is beyond the control of man. Unpredictable and unbiased, the devastation of a hurricane can cause destruction and rebirth. The hurricane in Zora Neale Hurston’s, “Their Eyes Were Watching God”, is a critical event that dramatically changes Janie’s life. When faced with the destruction of the hurricane, Janie and Tea Cake could only watch with terror as it destroyed their lives. The hurricane stripped all judgement, social class, and race, leaving them with the bare bones of their true selves.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. "The Snow of Kilimanjaro." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 8th ed. Vol. D. New York: W. W. Norton &, 2012. 826-42. Print.
As the villagers began to accept truth and not the superstitions, those who remained became very angry. The Ibo culture started to fall apart. The missionaries, Mr. Brown and Mr. Smith taught the women who were leaving their twins to die in t...
One rainy day in Fort Plane, New York a little orphaned boy wanders the long dirt roads to find shelter. As he is trying to keep out of the puddles from getting his feet wet, a car whizzes on by and soaks the poor child from head to toe with the dirty rain water. “This cannot be more of an inopportune time,” he mutters to himself, “just because you are not in the rain running doesn’t mean you have to slash the people on the streets.” Finally coming up and seeing a large farm with a silo perfect for him to hid away from the storm.
In An Abandoned Bundle, Mtshali recounts his discovery of an abandoned child, on faeces and garbage, attacked by wild dogs. Mtshali begins the poem with very soothing image of “morning mist” over a “white city”, however this is quickly distorted by the harsh, graphic simile